You forget that today's technology is not used in most avionics because of the
approval process from the FAA.  Most avionics are 70s technology.  This is one
of the main reasons that I got a degree in avionics and decided to work in
marine electronics.  I wanted to work on something a little more cutting edge
than 1972 circuits.

It may sound like a good idea on modern designs to be able to control them
remotely, but the chance of that going wrong and crashing a plane is about 1000
times more likely than of it saving one.

William Chops Westfield wrote:

>     With today's technology, mainly communication technology, I JUST CAN NOT
>     BELIEVE that in 5 hours flying in automatic pilot, it is not possible to
>     download information from a Learjet board computer and understand why
>     everybody aboard is dead or unconscious, and otherwise try to land it
>     even in a bad landing, better than wait it to crash.
>         :
>     I don't want to start a discussion here, not even a fight about [OT]s
>     but just transmit the idea, that when you develop something, please
>     think about safety and how it can impact human lifes, even being a small
>     PIC unit using a powerful explosive NiCad or Lithium battery.
>
> "Safety" is usually at odds with other values that people claim to believe
> in, such as privacy, affordability, accessability, and a large number of
> factors that are usually lumped together under the heading of "freedom."
> While the situation you descrive above is sad, it is also preferrable, I
> think, to crackers posting pictures of famous people looking weird as they
> sleep in airline seats, or assorted types of espionage carried out by
> similar mechanisms.  (rather like that revolution that succeeded because
> there was no back-door to the encryption algorithm that sealed the existing
> goverments armaments.  Sad, but better than the alternative.)
>
> "Those who would trade their liberty for safety deserve neither."  (Or
> something like that.  Ben Franklin.)
>
> OTOH, even as I type over here, there is source code over there that I'm
> working on which will add the off-requested "tap" feature to cisco terminal
> servers, to aid in "debugging" of complex async problems and such, where
> you'd like to see the data stream that's happening on some other terminal.
> For years I've fought this on privacy and "attractive nusiance" values, but
> I'm finally giving in based on the "there are a lot of other ways to do
> basically the same thing, anyway."  There's little doubt that elsewhere in
> the company, people are working on other parts of the federally mandated
> wiretap features...
>
> BillW